14211: Karshan: Haiti's Loune Viaud wins RFK Human Rights Award (San Francisco Bay View) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MKarshan@aol.com

San Francisco Bay View

December 24, 2002

Haiti’s Loune Viaud wins RFK Human Rights Award


Human Rights Laureate Loune Viaud
Washington – “Her activism began in the 1980s, when she worked in the slums
of Port-au-Prince with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was then a local parish
priest,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy when, on Nov. 20, he named Loune Viaud of
Haiti the 2002 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Laureate. Robert Kennedy’s
widow, Ethel Kennedy, their daughter, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Harry Belafonte
and others participated in the award ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office
Building.

“She organized programs for street children to obtain nutrition, education
and recreation. She taught the young about civic responsibility, community
activism and respect for human rights and other basic values, in spite of
threats from the military regime in Haiti in those years,” said Sen. Kennedy
about Viaud, now the director of Strategic Planning and Operations at the
Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health) socio-medical complex in Cange, Haiti. He
told how she escaped a massacre in 1988 and had to take refuge in the U.S.

In accepting the award, Viaud described “fighting for the rights of the poor
merely to survive.” She asked, “Do the sick deserve the right to health
care? Do the naked deserve the right to clothing? Do the homeless deserve the
right to shelter? Do the illiterate deserve the right to education?” and
added, “These basic social and economic rights must be part of being human.”

Quoting Martin Luther King, Viaud declared, “Of all the forms of inequality,
injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”

“As a Haitian woman who has seen first-hand what it means to be poor and
sick, I know that we can all do better,” Viaud said. “We can move from the
way things are, where the bottom billion is merely struggling not to suffer,
to be, as we say in Haiti, ‘kapab pa soufri,’ to a place in which ‘tout moun
se moun,’ everyone is a person - we are all human.”

Giving the gathering a taste of Haitian history and spirit, Viaud said, “I am
a Haitian, and the Haitian people have always stood for equality. From 1791,
when we fought against slavery to become the world’s first independent
republic born of a slave revolt, until 1986, when we began to cast down a
brutal family dictatorship, we Haitians have always struggled against long
odds. … Two hundred years of struggle, much of it in isolation even from
those who profess a belief in human rights. It has often felt lonely.”

Viaud condemned U.S. officials’ treatment of over 200 Haitian refugees whose
little boat landed recently in Miami, blaming the U.S. blockade of “even
development and humanitarian assistance to my people” for compelling them to
flee their beautiful Caribbean island.

“The International Development Bank (IDB) has withheld loans to Haiti
totaling $146 million for health care, clean water, basic education and rural
road rehabilitation,” she explained. “By continuing its policy to not
release these funds, the IDB is violating not only its own charter, but also
the human rights of the Haitian people.

“Robert F. Kennedy once said: ‘The obligation of free men is to use their
opportunities to improve the welfare of their fellow human beings.’ If RFK
were alive, he would help the Haitian people to improve their lives,” Viaud
concluded.

Read the complete speeches at www.rfkmemorial.org/human_rights/index.htm. For
more information about Haiti, email Pierre Labossiere at
pierrelabossiere@hotmail.com.